Battery Buchanan

Battery Buchanan, named for Confederate Adm. Franklin Buchanan, was constructed in 1864 to guard this point and to serve as "a citadel to which an overpowered garrison might retreat." The last major earthwork erected to support Fort Fisher, the "Gibraltar of the Confederacy," a mile northeast, it was manned by Confederate sailors and marines during the first of two battles for Fort Fisher on Christmas Day 1864, when its four-gun battery repulsed Federal boats dragging New Inlet for torpedoes, sinking one vessel. During the second battle on January 15, 1865, Confederate commanders Gen. W.H.C. Whiting and Col. William Lamb fell wounded, and when it became clear that the fort must be surrendered, they were hurriedly removed on stretchers to Battery Buchanan, where Maj. James Reilly proposed to make a stand but found the guns spiked and transportation gone, which Lamb later blamed on Capt. R.T. Chapman of the Confederate navy. Soon a Federal force led by the 27th U.S. Colored Troops threatened to overrun Battery Buchanan, and Reilly surrendered both the battery and Fort Fisher there, waving a handkerchief tied to his sword. Capt. E. Lewis Moore of the 7th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry accepted the surrender and the sword, and in 1893 Moore returned the sword to Reilly; it is displayed in the Fort Fisher Museum.

North Carolina · United States